USB Battery Pack Conversions (mAh to Wh)

I know I haven’t posted in a while – but I’ve had lots going on…. Then my first post back is a techie one, I apologise (well for some of you I do anyway!).

I want a backup battery for my Motorola Droid/Milestone, I’ve already got one for my iPod Touch and it’s invaluable – but I figure if I get one with a straight USB out it can charge almost any of my devices with the right cable! This makes far more sense to me, so today I went hunting. Would you believe how hard these things are to find?

I’ve been offered rechargable batteries, battery chargers, spare batteries for the phone all sorts of things – none of which were quite what I wanted, I think this boils down to not knowing what to search for – generally most of what I found was listed as:

“Rechargeable Backup Battery Pack USB”

I’ve found to, one by an unknown manufacturer (PINES) and one by Kensington, so I start doing a little comparison on them, the features I need are:

  • Small
  • Light
  • Capacity

Shouldn’t be that hard really, nobody can play with dimensions or weight (although there will probably be trade-offs for capacity!) but they’re pretty much standard:

Model Weight Dimensions
PINES Not Listed Not Listed (but it does show it against a car charger and someone’s hand!
Kensington 100g 10.1 cm x 5.5 cm x 1.1 cm

Almost sold then, Kensington tell me lots of information about their pack and it’s 7wH capacity, compared to Pines 4800mAh?
Wait a minute…. Are we comparing apples with apples and beans with beans here?

What are wH and how do we convert them to mAH?

I found a useful link on camerahacker with conversions, so let’s crunch the numbers.. It’s probably easier to convert the Pines product so it is also in wH

watt = amp * volt

So,

Wh = 4.8Ah * 5.5VDC (Note we've converted the mAh to Ah by dividing it by 1000)
Wh = 26.4

Compared to the Kensington device – that’s huge! 26.4Wh vs 7Wh (and it’s cheaper!)…
Have I got something wrong here?

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at 12:11 pm and is filed under Mobile Phones. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


Comments (3)

 

  1. Keiron says:

    Update: @zuuMediaSwindon has the PINES one and it charges his Blackberry 3-4 times! That’s definitely me sold!

  2. Dave says:

    Bit of a whoosh over my head on that one ;)
    Dave´s last [type] ..apple iPad Cases

  3. Keiron says:

    Hi Dave,

    I think there was for a lot of people, but I needed to explain it to get it out of my head!!

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